


between the past and the ground

by misandrywitch



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic), Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: ????????, A.I. - Freeform, Aliens, Alternate Universe - Space, Wolf 359 au, Zero-gravity sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 12:11:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11531961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: Once upon a time there were two friends who had a lot of potential, both individually and together. One of them couldn't handle the pressure, and the other went on to do something brave and never came back.Til he did.Now that’s a plot twist.





	between the past and the ground

**Author's Note:**

  * For [punkpadfoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkpadfoot/gifts).



> see the end of this fic for a complete list of warnings because it's something. just a warning. title is from "introduction to quantum theory" by franny choi.
> 
> kent "there's a new sheriff in town" parson. jack "i am in charge of this disaster" zimmermann. "lardo "i'll vent your ass into space through a hole the size of a quarter" duan. shitty "it's ABOUT!!!! BASIC!!! HUMAN!!!!!! RIGHTS!!!!" knight. 
> 
> uh. i feel weird even dumping this into either tag because yes it's both but also it's NEITHER, it is its own monstrosity. it will be relevant to like six people in the universe & i wrote it for one person & one person only. i don't want to discuss this - don't look at me, don't breathe in my direction. email me never. 
> 
> for cait.... love you bitch. never gonna stop loving you bitch. you drove me to this hope youre happy.
> 
> highly doubt it'll make sense unless you've listened to wolf 359 - all pretty directly based on the arc through season 2 of the show specifically "mutually assured destruction," "no pressure" and "happy to be of assistance"

 

 

‘How does distance look?’ is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved. It depends on light.

Anne Carson, _Autobiography of Red_

 

What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be  alive. Something dead that doesn’t know it’s dead.

Richard Siken, _Landscape with fruit rot and millipede_

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack was pretty convinced Shitty was either pulling his leg or experiencing some kind of delayed deep-space side effect from the marijuana he had attempted to grow in the station greenhouse several rotations back when he told him about hearing the voice the first time. He’d noticed, over the first few hundred days, a number of strange and un-explainable things taking place aboard the U.S.S. Hephaestus. Jack does not believe in the strange and un-explainable and, more importantly, Jack does not have time for it. It won’t do, not on his station. So he doesn’t believe a word of it and files Shitty’s frantic, shouting story away into the category of “Not His Problem.”

As far as anything that happens on the Hephaestus is Not His Problem, anyway. By virtue of the title almost everything is Lieutenant Commander Jack Zimmermann’s problem. But some of them require greater attention than others.

That is, of course, until the mutiny and the malfunctions and the hours he and Shitty spend scrambling to reboot auxiliary power only to find that, inexplicably, something is already waiting for them.

It’s like finding a time capsule, when it starts playing. Shitty’s reaction is excitement - “It’s that thing!” he crows.

“What?” Jack can’t piece it together. A ghostly whisper, a distorted voice. He gets why hearing it in the dark would be terrifying.

“Those fucking freaky-deaky noises I kept hearing when Lards went offline a few months ago, I knew I wasn’t making it up!”

“I can’t understand it,” Jack says, and they both pause for a second to listen. “Can you clean it up?”

“I bet,” Shitty says, and he types frantically. “Even better, I bet I can get it to start over. Let’s see - wait - “

There’s a crackle of static and they both jump, Shitty grabbing at Jack’s bicep.

“There,” Shitty nods, his eyes moving across the screen. “Listen.”

_I don’t know who you are. There’s no way you have any reason to believe what I’m gonna say and I can’t prove it to you - and if you’ve lived through anything like I have maybe it’s smarter if you don’t - but you gotta listen._

“What is this?” Shitty says, but Jack grabs at his shoulder. It feels urgent, suddenly, to hear more. The voice, radio static, sounds grating, angry and ice cold. But -

“Hold on,” he says. “Quiet.”

 _My name,_ the recording says, _is Captain Kent Parson. I’m the commanding officer of the U.S.S. Hephaestus Station. 944 days ago I arrived at this station with my crew on a deep space survey mission. We were supposed to be studying the fucking star, it’s radiation. A lie. All of it. Lies._

“This isn’t possible,” Jack says, slowly. “This can’t - “

“Someone was here before us?” Shitty says, quietly, as Captain Kent Parson’s voice continues, grating and angry and ice-cold. He thinks that’s what Jack means, all Jack means - that the scope of this catastrophe is so much bigger than their lives, that the scope of this story extends beyond their own tragedies.

That is what Jack means, a little. But he doesn’t understand the specifics because this tragedy is one that Jack Zimmermann already knows.

 

 

 

 

 

Jack doesn’t try to spend much time dwelling on the logs he and Shitty found in the abandoned lab. He does, of course, because he’s human. But he tries not to think about them and saves them all for the moments before sleep, a dense and lonely sadness that’s sitting inside his ribs and now has teeth and a voice to what previously were only generalizations and assumptions.

That’s why, when Lardo sees the shuttle coming towards them and Jack speaks into the intercom with Shitty crowded at his elbow as they brace themselves for the next big thing, he thinks for a moment he may be dreaming.

It would explain a lot, if he were dreaming, because he hears a voice and it’s one he knows.  

“Who am I speaking to?”

Next to him, Shitty’s fingers drum nervously on the coms panel and his eyes are wide and it can’t be possible that Jack recognizes that voice because he’s dead, he’s dead dammit, he’s –

“You are talking to Lieutenant Commander Jack Zimmermann of the U.S.S. Hephaestus,” Jack says, “now identify yourself.”

“No,” the voice crackles through the speakers again, all anger and panic, “No, fuck I’m not, no. What? State your identity! Why did you bring me back here!”

“We didn’t,” Jack says quickly, because if he keeps speaking he doesn’t have time to think that this is absolutely all in his head, that he’s finally cracked and he’s seeing the long-dead arriving at the front door for dinner. “Your shuttle just appeared on our scanners - “

“And this can’t be real,” the voice crackles and spits, “so tell me who the fuck you really are!”

“My name is Lieutenant Commander Jack - “

“And I’m telling you that is not possible, because Jack fucking Zimmermann is three hundred light years from here on earth, he’s not here, he can’t be here. And I’m – this is the commander of the U.S.S. Hephaestus Station. So who the hell are you?”

Jack’s world collapses around that voice. Ringing silence, his own heartbeat, and that voice - right out of a grave in New York state with no body in it and he doesn’t even hear himself when he responds and all he says is “Kent?”

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

_Hephaestus Station. Captain Kent Parson here._

_I have to tell you - that our evasive maneuvers have failed._

_The alien mothership is closing in on our location, and I see no other choice but to go full Rambo on these bastards. If we’re luck we’ll avoid their death ray. Shoot ‘em in the tentacles, or the dick but be careful - don’t look into their third eye!_

_Oh and - if you need some liquid courage to steel yourself against the oncoming storm, I’ve got a bottle of Malibu Pineapple in the aft deck but you gotta sing your favorite Britney song to get some._

_It’s - it’s okay, Officer Goldammer. Just a little lighthearted fun to pass the -_

_Okay, okay! Got it! Message received, thank you! Now make like a train, and fuck off._

_Jesus, he’s as bad as you are. You two would get along. Or hate each other. Probably hate each other. Beat each other to death with your copies of Pryce and Carter and do the whole universe a favor._

_I gotta tell you, though -_

_This morning we were doing some repairs on those electrical panels that went screwy week before last, and Fisher thought it’d be fine to go at it without powering the generator down because the circuits aren’t even that close together. I was gonna trust him, cause what the hell do I know about circuits but - but this little voice popped into my head._

_Your voice. Yeah. I fucking know. It went “Are you following protocol Kent??” and it turns out, I wasn’t, so I fixed it. And it saved Fisher from electrocution, probably, so thanks for that, asshole. Have to be right. You’re still a dick, but thanks._

_Funny, right. I keep asking myself “What would Jack do?” which is super annoying, but so far it’s been a pretty good strategy for doing this right._

_Yeah. I can feel you looking smug from seven and a half light years away._

_Oh, right. Uh - speaking of. Fuck protocol. Uh, this is the log of Captain Kent Parson. Day 97. We are not under attack by little green men._

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

When Jack Zimmermann was three years old, his father circumnavigated the earth in a shuttle.

Impressive, sure, but it was only in the top five of the most impressive thing he accomplished. Jack doesn’t remember watching the shuttle leave, he was too young, but there’s video footage of that moment. Held in his mother’s arms, the hair blows back out of their faces as they stand in the Florida sun and look skyward. Always looking skyward, wondering what he would do next. Jack started life out three steps behind.

There’s a line of photographs in his parents’ house of his father shaking hands with a few presidents, mixed in with their 1980’s wedding photo glamour shot, Jack’s childhood snapshots, an image of four people smiling at Niagra Falls, Jack as a cadet in a sea of other clean-cut uniformed faces.

Kent’s on that wall, somewhere, in that sea of faces. Young and handsome and cocky, captured proud of himself and smiling. They’re shoulder to shoulder. Always were. Jack never had the heart to ask his mother to take the photo down because it had felt so arbitrary and petty, at first, after the hospital and their falling out. Falling out - because it hadn’t been a fight, exactly, not right away. Things had just stopped, the way engines just fail mid-flight sometimes and plummet, uncontrollable and helpless, back into gravity.

When Kent had died Jack asked for a copy. It wasn’t the only photo of them together, but it was the only one he wanted to frame in his home.

When he’d packed for the Hephaestus mission Jack had assembled a notebook full of things he wanted to bring with him. That shot of himself and his mother, two pairs of blue eyes turned skyward, was in there. His parents’ wedding photo. A shot of his dad, sunburned and smiling, in the back of a boat. His own wedding photos - and pictures of Bitty smiling bent over the kitchen counter, smiling with his elbow against the glass at a hockey game, dusting sugar across the top a tray of beignets. And one three-photo snapshot, sun-faded, from one of those photo booths at a county fair.

Two smiles turned towards the camera, then one head thrown back in laughter, then one mouth makes contact with a jaw. Old memories, hidden away until they became photographs of someone’s ghost. Someone who had been dead for years when Jack Zimmermann left earth to fly farther than his father had ever gone, seven and a half light years from earth.

Or so he’d thought.

 

 

 

 

 

The expression on Kent’s face wavers but his hand around his gun doesn’t. Jack’s own body is ice and steel, teetering on the edge of a long fall down somewhere dark. This isn’t possible, and Kent has been dead for years, but there he is, gun in Jack’s face- features tight and drawn and lined and older, alien, strange, it’s been years and this is impossible –

“Now you,” Jack says, because he has to. “Tell me. The last thing you said to me.”

Something dark moves across Kent’s features. anger, humor, regret. as familiar as a punch in the face. He doesn’t even need to speak for Jack to know.

“I said,” he says, and flinches, “I hope turning down the job would make your Dad proud.”

“Jesus,” Shitty, hovering in between them, says (the vowel stretches long, surprise, Jeeeeeeeeeesus), “thought you said you guys were friends?”

And Kent laughs. “Sure were,” he says, and he lowers the gun.

There’s a story behind that, like there’s a story behind everything. The one Jack didn’t tell Shitty when they’d found those voice recordings, Kent Parson’s last words encapsulated in amber and waiting for someone to hear them.

There were two kids, and they were best friends or maybe more, and then one of them couldn’t handle it and everything went to shit and years later when given the chance to trust each other again one of them turned it down. The other died in space. Some story.

And now - everything Jack’s done in between now and then, his career, his marriage, this job, the creeping dread that this is the end of the line for him just as it was the end of the line for Captain Kent Parson - turns upside down.

 

 

 

 

 

“You can’t be here,” Kent says again. He says it like Jack’s supposed to know what this means. His eyes skitter across Jack’s face so fast Jack can almost feel them and he can’t stop looking back. “You’re not supposed to be here. This is - this is the worst thing - “

He laughs. Jack stares at him and tries to pretend that doesn’t hurt. _Make your Dad proud._ How is it that some things never, ever change?

“You can’t be here either,” Jack says flatly, “because the man I know who looks like you is dead.” But he isn’t. But here he is, unshaven, blonde hair falling into his eyes, the freckles Jack remembers summer-clear faded to nothing. His upstate accent, the slope of his shoulders, his eyes with their shifting color, his pupils so small they’re almost missing.

“Yeah,” Kent says. The movement of his mouth. His upper lip. His throat as he swallows. He hasn’t stopped moving. Real, real, real. “Guessed as much. Dead’s relative, I suppose. Hey Zimms. You miss me?”

“We buried you,” Jack says, his mouth numb. “But you’re - “

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Kent repeats. His hands move, and his eyes, then the rest of his body. They meet in the middle just for a moment and Jack’s momentum sends him spinning sideways so they rotate, feet over head, and Kent’s body is like a live wire. Tense and hard. It doesn’t feel real. His fist catches in Jack’s uniform. Flexes, lets it go.

“Yeah,” he says, and then he pushes Jack away so they spin in opposite directions. Some thing never change. “Yeah I am.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“So,” Shitty says, his voice probably aiming for nonchalance but getting much closer to confusion. “That really is Captain Parson? Like, really really?”

“It looks that way,” Jack says slowly. “It seems impossible. They told us he was dead, but - “

“Maybe he’s a clone!” Shitty says cheerfully. “Or a really good robot replica. You ever seen Bladerunner, Zimmermann?”

“No.”

“And I’m a little too familiar with the Turing test already, Shits,” Lardo says. Jack wonders if she even noticed she’s used the familiar nickname in front of him, then decides he doesn’t care. They have much bigger things to think about than protocol and programming. And it’s sweet, anyway. Kind of.

The fact that Kent is alive. Seems alive. Somehow. And -

“I’d like to focus on the fact that we now have a spaceship parked on our doorstep,” Jack says, because if he doesn’t keep thinking about what the next step is he’ll have to stop and think about what this means.

“Jack,” Shitty says finally, which is not protocol but they’re far beyond that and things like _respectability_ and _chain of command_ feel like they mean less and less the better they know each other. “If we can gerry-rig that floating bong out there to carry us anywhere, who exactly is gonna come along?”

His eyes are very green and they don’t flinch when Jack frowns.

“Whoever we can trust,” Jack says, and he leaves it at that.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

_This is the log of Captain Kent Parson. Day -_

_What was that?_

_Did you hear that? There - there it is again? I’ve been hearing things for a few weeks. Always late at night when everyone else is asleep. It sounds like that apartment we lived in, me and Mom and Sam, with the mice in it. Rats in the walls. There wouldn’t be rats in space, right?_

_The doc thinks I’m running myself ragged. We all are, I guess. Fuck it. We can sleep when we get off this station. You know, it’s funny. Of the two of us, you were the nutty one. But now I’m the one cracking up. Is this how you felt? Guess I don’t feel like popping painkillers, I just wish it would -_

_Damn it._

_Does anyone even listen to these? We all keep making these logs and sending them but - man, it’s been months. Nobody’s come. No word. Nothing. There’s something they haven’t told me._

_There- listen._

_I keep wondering what you would do, if you were here. You know, when we left I was so pissed at you. So determined to go and see the whole goddamn galaxy and everything you were missing because you couldn’t see past your own pride. But I stopped being mad a lot sooner than I thought I would. Guess that’s what happens when you’re not around to shout back. Then I just wished you were here, man. It was supposed to be us. The two of us, doing this together. What we promised._

_I guess I’m glad, Zimms. That you’re not here right now. Spent so much time wishing you were but right now -_

_You’re back there. Watching hockey, fishing with your dad, wearing dumbass shorts. You’re not going through this. For the first time, I’m happy about that._

 

 

 

 

 

 

“So, uh,” Shitty looks over at him and anyone else might look suspicious but he doesn’t. His face gets very open, all the irritation, the worry about Lardo, the fear dropping out of it. “There’s some backstory here. Huh? Is it obnoxious if I ask what it is?”

“Yes, Officer,” Jack says sharply. “Yes it is.”

“Right,” Shitty says.

“We were best friends,” Jack says. He almost doesn’t mean to. It just comes out of him. “A long time ago, when we were kids.

“You and Captain Kent Parson? What are the fucking odds? Of all the space stations you coulda wandered into - “

“Yeah. I didn’t know this was the station he was on until - until we heard that recording.”

“You were really friends with this guy?” Shitty asks. Jack knows he’s thinking of Kent’s voice telling that joke, Kent’s voice admonishing a non-existent version of Jack for sticking to the rules.

“He was always funnier than me,” Jack says quickly.

“You wanna keep listening to this?” Shitty puts his hand on Jack’s shoulder.

“Yes,” Jack says, because he does. “Just give me a moment.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

How strange, to be able to distill history with someone into a line. _We were best friends a long time ago, when we were kids._ Not a lie, but Jack doesn’t know what words describe what they were to each other.

He wishes he could show Shitty, who he finds he trusts more than he’s trusted anyone in a while despite his disregard for the rules, his non-regulation hair, his nonsensical way of speaking. A series of images, a string of moments.

This image; Jack and Kent, just on the edges of adulthood. Bad hair, bad acne, big dreams. Kent - handsome, personable, smarter than almost everyone gave him credit for - could have befriended anyone but he picked Jack. They shared space, shared textbooks, shared time and inside jokes.

And secrets, as they got older. A breathless kiss in a locked bathroom ended abruptly and picked up later - secrets held between the two of them, some kind of promise. And Jack’s own that Kent helped keep. Repetitive habits, reaching for a bottle when his hands would shake.

And this image: two or three years later. Jack’s shoulder, under a hospital bedsheet, and the white wash of a hospital wall. He hadn’t looked Kent in the eye when he came in and everything under his closed eyelids was white and hot. His whole body hurt and Kent’s voice broke and Jack thought he ought to feel sad about that, but he didn’t.

Kent put his hand on Jack’s shoulder and Jack could feel through the hospital blanket how cold his hands were, and he hadn’t turned to watch him leave the room.

“I’ll call you,” Kent had said, and Jack had said nothing.

Kent had called, for a while, until he stopped.

And this image. Maybe the most telling.

Years later, six or seven. The two of them in the back room of some fancy party they’d both been attending. Jack didn’t know Kent was coming. Jack uniform and Kent should have be in uniform but he was wearing a tuxedo and they both had too much champagne. Jack felt Kent circling all night, thought that he should just leave and escape the confrontation he knew would come if they make contact, but he didn’t.

It didn’t start out as a confrontation. It started how it always started, Kent’s hand in Jack’s hair and his mouth desperate and familiar against Jack’s jaw.

They moved and fumbled their way into privacy and then Kent spoke, and the illusion fell apart, but that was familiar too.

“I’ve just accepted a new job,” he said. “A private company. I’m tired of the military and I’m so sick of Iraq.”

Kent’s freckles were out in abundance, a takeaway from his last tour.

“Good for you,” Jack said, wary.

“Goddard Futuristics,” Kent continued, aware of the set of Jack’s jaw and ignoring it. “You interested?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jack’s heart leapt, then fell. Things with Kent Parson were always a double-edged sword. No matter which side you grabbed at you always got cut.

“Let me put in a good word for you,” Kent said. “They’re filling a bunch of positions. Deep space. It’s what we always wanted. Sweet deal, right? I bet you could swing your own command, screw NASA.”  

“Get out,” Jack said, the words coming right from his gut - and it wasn’t the worst thing he said before that argument was over but it was the most honest and, with context, probably the meanest.

He thought about that when he booked an emergency flight to upstate New York, when he sat with Kent’s mother on the couch for a long time without speaking, when he watched them fold an American flag in the snow and lay it on top of a coffin. It wasn’t the last thing he said to Kent exactly, but it was the last order he gave him.

Ironic, of course, that he got his own call from Goddard Futuristics a few years after that. It felt as much like an opportunity as it felt like an _I told you so,_ but Jack wasn’t an idiot.

He thought about asking about Kent, in the interview, but thought it unprofessional. It came up anyway.

“He spoke very highly of you,” the Goddard representative - Cutter - said when he shook Jack’s hand. That made Jack wonder what, exactly, Kent had said about him. “It was a tragedy.”

“Yes,” Jack said. “Yes it was.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

Jack opens the coms bay doors and Kent and Shitty are talking together, laughing. Charmed him already.

When Kent laughs he looks like the young man Jack knew, laughing sleep-softened in the uncomfortable single bed they’d cram in together when nobody else was around. Back when they were young and believed they could have everything they wanted, maybe even each other, dreams as wide and formless as the vast expanse of space they both promised they’d traverse side by side together someday. Together, implied - but implied was never enough and Jack hadn’t known how to say, wearing black watching the frost clinging to the edge of the casket as they folded the flag at Kent’s funeral, that it was his fault for never quite knowing how to care enough.

Some mistakes you don’t make twice.

That’s what he’s thinking when he finds the bomb.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Be careful,” Lardo says, as Jack shoves his way through the shuttle. “I’m picking up radiological signatures.”

“That’s the VX3 core from the number one engine,” Jack says automatically. He feels stupid, like he’s hunting for something illicit. He’s glad Lardo’s with him even if she isn’t, strictly speaking, with him. She’s in his ear, anyway. “I can’t believe they found a way to stabilize it.”

“Not positive they did,” Lardo says shortly. “It’s a clusterfu - uh - “

“Go on,” Jack sighs.

“Clusterfuck, Commander. Power levels are fluctuating like someone is having a heart attack. Serious mess.”

“Bottom line,” Jack says, looking around the shuttle. He doesn’t really think three people could fit in it. He doesn’t know how Kent fit in it and survived. It still feels like a dream, somehow, even more so as he moves away from the living, breathing physical evidence itself. “Will this thing fly?”

There’s a silence. “It’s a kid’s art project,” Lardo says, finally. Jack doesn’t know what that means. “Glued together around a nuclear reactor. Could blow sky high right now and it’s going zero miles an hour. “

“What do you think we should do?”

“Dump it,” Lardo says sharply. “Before you all start glowing like the fourth of July from radiation poisoning, or worse.”

Jack takes a deep breath. Jack tries to think about what Shitty would say. “This could be,” he says, “our only chance for all of us to get home. I don’t know if we’ll get another one. I won’t - I can’t make any rash decisions.”

There’s a long silence, again. The ship’s A.I. system isn’t known to be loquacious, outside the times Jack catches her and Shitty in the middle of an argument or a story or a game of battleship, but this silence says something that Jack doesn’t see the scope of yet.

“What’s wrong?” He says.

“Nothing,” Lardo says, peevishly.

“If we left,” Jack hazards a guess and the silence that follows his words confirms it, “on this ship, you couldn’t come with us, could you?”

“I don’t know,” Lardo says. “Don’t think so.”

“I don’t - “ having a conversation with nowhere to look is strange, so Jack keeps tinkering with the ship’s engines to direct his gaze. “I don’t know what to say,” he says finally. He doesn’t have the right answer to this, because there isn’t one. He pries rather violently at a panel, just to make some noise.

“Don’t tell Shitty,” Lardo says swiftly. “If this is your chance then I can’t let you pass it up.” And they both know Shitty well enough to know his reaction. “But I really don’t think the shuttle will make it, Commander.”

“If that’s really what you think, then - “ The panel Jack is pulling pops off, and he starts. Stops. Stares. “Lardo.”

“Yeah?”

Jack rubs his eyes. Looks again. Fear floods through him like liquid, ice-cold. But it’s followed by anger, hot and dense and mean. For a moment he can’t breathe and he wishes he would wake up. Wishes he’d never found Kent’s shuttle at all because this -- this can’t be -

“Tell me I’m not looking at what I think I’m looking at.”

“I think the appropriate response is, uh,” Lardo pauses, “holy fucking shit, Commander.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

In his head, Kent is twenty-two and he’s touching the back of Jack’s arm with his hand and he’s smiling - “Hey,” he says, “Look at you,” but that was then and this is now and he doesn’t smile like that when Jack opens the door and draws the gun. He grins.

When Kent grins it’s all edges and fire right at the back of his eyes, and Jack thinks he doesn’t know him at all.

“I think you’re done threatening us,” Jack says. His hands don’t shake. None of this feels real.

“I am not in a place where I care about what you think,” Kent says. That was never true before. Not once. “Welcome to my cold war, Zimms.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

It seems fitting somehow that Kent, pushed to the edge, goes for the tactic that Kent always utilizes when pushed to the edge. Watch his heart-rate climb and climb until it reaches a peak, until it can’t take it anymore, until it boils over into words that can’t be taken back, damage that can’t be undone. Except this is literal and his heart-rate is measured in slow beeps that pick up speed as his temper climbs. Dead man’s switch. A little too on the nose - Kent Parson the walking time-bomb.

It’s pretty funny, actually. Maybe his perspective on what’s funny is off these days, but it makes Jack laugh.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“You’re pissed,” Kent says. “I can tell.”

“What gave that away,” Jack grates out. Both Lardo and Shitty voiced that they think it’s a terrible idea for the two of them to be alone together. It is a terrible idea, but Jack doesn’t care.

“You get this vein that sticks out on your forehead when you’re furious - I’d forgotten.”

“That clued you in, did it?”

“Might’ve. I don’t have a choice. Don’t take it personally. You’re taking it personally.” Kent fiddles with the communications array. Outside the window, the star flares a little and dies down.

“You could trust us.”

“What, your merry band of misfits? I don’t think so. Don’t have that kind of time for you to wait around and talk yourselves into this. God, this shit tastes like seaweed.” He slurps tea from a thermos, makes a face.

“Deal with it.”

“If we’re gonna have pointless arguments,” Kent peers at the thermos, “can we talk about what the fuck you’re doing here?”

“I admit it’s a weird coincidence - “

“No, not on the station. On any station. At Goddard.” Kent flips the lid of the thermos open. The tea, translucent and slightly green, floats out in a perfect sphere. “You told me you didn’t want the job. You just had to wait ‘til I was out of the picture to be sure you did it on your own? Did you beg?”

“They called me,” Jack says. “You want to talk about that? Now?”

“Should I take it personally?”

“You were dead - “

“They killed me,” Kent snaps. “Do you want a play-by-play?”

“We found your logs,” Jack says, and Kent’s mouth snaps shut. The bubble of tea bobs across the room towards Jack’s head and he moves to avoid it. He keeps moving, because he can, until he’s the inverse of Kent. It feels symbolic - no way to tell which way is up or down and they’re still going two different directions.

“Oh,” Kent says.

If Jack had said yes to that job, he could have been there. He could have stopped it.

“I want to be happy,” Jack says, slowly, “that you’re not dead. But you’re making it really difficult.”

“I don’t care if you hate me,” Kent snaps back. “Go ahead. It’s not like that’s any different. But nobody else is dying on my watch, especially not Jack fucking Zimmermann. Do you not get that? There is no room for error here.”

“You could trust me to hold my own.”

“There is no room for error,” Kent says, and Jack knows they’re both thinking of Jack’s shoulders under hospital sheets. “You don’t gotta be happy about it.”

“Kenny,” Jack says - he doesn’t mean to, it just comes out - and Kent winces. Kent winces so Jack finishes his trajectory and turns himself right-side-up.

“Don’t,” Kent says. His eyes are weary. Wary. But alive - Jack wonders if he’s in shock - alive and Kent’s eyes, _Kent’s._ That he was never going to see again.

His body moves before his mind is fully aware that it’s happening. Like a reflex, like muscle memory, Kent’s jaw under Jack’s palm and Kent says something - maybe a protest, maybe his name - but it’s lost when Jack kisses him.

“I’m sorry,” Jack says, when he pulls away. Kent is breathing hard. His mouth stays open, surprised. The band on his wrist beeps once or twice, then slows. There is no similar meter for Jack’s own heartrate and he’s glad.

“Don’t think that follows protocol,” Kent says slowly, mouth still open, and Jack flees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kissing Kent Parson felt like the moment when he closed his hand over the control stick of an aircraft and squeezed, feeling the acceleration grab onto the space right behind his ribcage and yank hard. Dizzying, freefall, breathless.   

It was terrible idea. Started almost by accident, a collision of gravity and proximity and Kent’s shoulder bumping into Jack’s one time too many, beer and party lights and a locked bathroom in a friend’s house. An accident Jack couldn’t forget until he repeated it. One they never put words to, once they repeated it a few more times.

Can you call something an accident when you start doing it on purpose?

It was a terrible idea and they both knew it. For many reasons; the logistics - a transgression, something out of line, a secret. And the specifics - a dichotomy, always at opposite ends. Jack was ramrod discipline and single-mindedness, Kent was freewheeling exuberance. Jack was ruthless and Kent was mean and they fought as easy as breathing. Jack’s father had walked on the moon and Kent didn’t know his at all, and they both had something to prove. Jack walked the line, Kent barrelled over it. Jack worried about consequences, Kent apologized for making the mess afterwards.

It should have been like oil and water - but when they met, a handshake in a crowded room and Kent’s smile, and then Kent’s hand on Jack’s shoulder so often it felt purposeful, and then the intimacy of drinking out of a bottle Kent’s mouth had touched two seconds before, and then the thrilling fear of sliding hands over skin as silently as they could - Jack felt known. He didn’t like that, necessarily. His secrets were too horrible for anyone else to see and so he hid them and thought that was the end of it.

It wasn’t, of course. He should have realized. It was a terrible idea.

But like most things that he knew through and through were terrible for him, Jack loved it.

There was kissing Kent Parson, but then there was this.

Summer - huge gaps of hot, muggy time with no purpose. They took a long weekend trip to Jack’s parents’ summer place on the lake and it felt like an unstructured promise, something a little too personal to be hidden. They paddled canoes around and staved off sunburns and ate until they felt ill, waiting until the cool night air dropped down over the house and the lights dimmed with it.

A stretch of grass, humidity on the neck of a beer bottle. Kent’s shoulder against Jack’s shoulder. And the sky, wide and clear and so dark, scattered with stars that were so bright they didn’t look real.

“Which one do you wanna visit?” Kent asked, passing Jack the bottle. Their fingers touched and they did nothing to stop it. There was nobody there to care.

“I don’t think we get to pick,” Jack said. “And I’ll settle for leaving the atmosphere first. Step at a time.”

“Don’t limit yourself,” Kent said. “It’s gonna happen someday. Why shouldn’t we be there to see it?”

“Okay,” Jack said. It felt like someone had faith in him, Kent’s eyes on him. “Which one do you want to see?”

“I asked you.”

“It was your idea.”

“Come on,” Kent said, and Jack felt self-conscious as he pointed in a direction he hoped made sense.

“That one,” he said. “First, I mean.”

“Good,” Kent said, “cause I’m gonna scope out that one there,” he pointed too, his elbow wavering for a second before settling on a spot. Jack caught it to hold it steady. “You’ll be right next door. I’ll shout at you, from the surface.”

“Send you a message in semaphore,” Jack said.

“In Morse code. S.O.S. Zimmermann! Your ass looks great in that space suit!”

Jack caught the edge of Kent’s laugh in his own mouth when he kissed him, rolling them both over in the grass so the sky above them spun, gras-stars-grass-stars. Until it all blurred into one where up and down didn’t matter, where the only thing he thought about was Kent’s grin above or below him, and his tousled hair, and his breath.

Jack remembers thinking that - just for a moment - he wasn’t wishing he was off far away and somewhere else, setting records, making news and that - just for a moment - he was content with everything that fell into the edges of his vision, stars-grass-stars and Kent’s grin and that promise that they’d do it together, right alongside each other, and that nothing would be able to change that for them at all.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

_Captain’s log. Day 872._

_Goldammer died today. I sat with him, ‘til the end. It was relatively painless, I guess. I guess that’s good, as far as these things go._

_He gave me some letters. For his brothers, his mom. He said - when he was a kid, they all watched his Dad die and he wanted to make sure they all knew it was easy, for him. I’d promised we’d deliver them if we get back to Earth._

_Fourier thinks there’s something wrong with the comms, and that’s why nobody’s come to help us. Wish I could believe that. Fuck you. Really wish I could._

_I looked her in the eye and said that it was just a matter of time. Said it was gonna be okay._

_Said that to Goldie too. He said - told me if things were different he woulda asked me out sometime. I woulda said yes. I told him he’d still get the chance. Told him everything was gonna be okay._

_I know it’s probably pretty weird to hear me like this, but I have to say that to everyone else and I don’t wanna lie to you. Not this time._

_I don’t know what to do._

_You would, if you were here. Know the right thing to do. You would because you always do, Zimms, even when you don’t think you do or even when it sucks. You’re better at this shit than me._

_Everyone keeps asking me what’s next, what do you we do next? They need me to get them out of this and I don’t know what’s next. Wish I could talk to you. You’d tell me the right thing to say. I hope what I said is what you’dve done._

_I wish I could talk to you just to say sorry. I owe you that much.  I’m so glad you’re not here._

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

It falls into a rhythm, somehow. Rhythms are comfortable. They don’t give Jack the space to think _what if,_ or time to dwell on just how easily Kent snatched control of the situation right out of his hands.

Wake up, run diagnostics, make repairs, argue until exhaustion, sleep. Repeat.

Jack wonders if this is his fault. The man he knew was bright, impulsive and personable, underplayed his own intelligence because it made things easier, ran without looking where he was going for the fun of it. But he was also a good older brother, an outgoing anchor in almost every dynamic he found himself inserted in, the suggester of bad ideas that turned into great memories. Of the two of them, he was better at lying but he was also better at saying what he thought.

Jack wonders if he did this to Kent, or had a hand in it. Made him angry, brittle, uncompromising. Desperate.

Logically, he knows it’s not his fault. But it feels like it.

So - rinse, repeat. Argue until Kent’s dead man sensor starts beeping. Get trapped inside a uninsulated docking corridor with Kent and Shitty squabbling and running out of air on the other side of a blocked door. Day in the life.

The sound of the bomb beeping is a reminder, Jack thinks, of who Captain Kent Parson is when the chips are down.

“So,” Kent’s voice says, something like a smile in it, “Officer Knight. Want to hear a story?”

“Uh,” Shitty says, because this isn’t a time for stories, “no?”

“When we were kids,” Kent says, “I put my foot through Bad Bob Zimmermann’s bathroom wall.”

“Don’t,” Jack starts, because Jack knows where this is going, but Shitty cuts him off with something like glee.

“Communications requests clarification,” he says, “that this is indeed an autobiographical story.”

“Roger comms,” Kent says, “I did used to hang out at Bad Bob Zimmermann’s house.”

“Kent,” Jack snaps. “What are you doing?”

“Calming myself down,” Kent says. “It’s my heart rate we’re worried about right now, right? Or do you want the last thing you hear to be this story?”

Jack takes a long, deep breath.

“Don’t get graphic,” he says.

“Spaceship actual,” Shitty says, “Uh, can you confirm that his biceps are as good looking as they are in real-life?”

“Reports from my eyeballs before I left Earth confirm that he’s a total DILF, Communications.” Kent really is grinning now. Jack can tell. That sounds like something Kent Parson would say. Jack’s fingers are frozen and his chest hurts.

“I hate both of you,” Jack says, teeth chattering. “For the record.”

“Quiet, man,” Shitty says, as the beep that monitors Kent’s living, breathing heart beat begins to slow. “I’m listening to this.”

 

 

 

 

“Everything about this,” Jack says later, after the crisis of the day has been dealt with and the crew has dispersed and they’re alone, “would be easier if you would just trust us to get the job done.”

“Why the hell should I do that?” Kent asks. It seems to be a genuine question. Jack knows they’re both thinking back to a decade of promises they made each other and didn’t keep.

“Because it may increases our chances of not getting blown sky high!” Jack snaps. “At least not by you.”

“Don’t think so,” Kent turns to move past Jack and cut it off but this is what they do best, always has been, and Jack can’t let it go.

“Then at least,” Jack says, “make my part of this easier and stop making so many goddamn stupid decisions.”

“Your part? What’s your part? Throwing the rulebook at me? Or ignoring me altogether.”

“My part is making sure that you don’t murder my crew,” Jack says, cold.

“Don’t get me too riled up, Zimmermann,” Kent says. “You send my blood pressure through the roof and we all go kaboom. _Lieutenant._ ”

“Don’t stand so close to me then,” Jack snaps, because he knows it will hurt. “Sir.”

Kent takes a deep breath. Jack studies the lines under his eyes, well aware of his own heart rate. His own blood pressure. “I don’t actually want to fight with you,” Kent says after a second. “Because contrary to what you may think I don’t actually wanna blow us all sky high. Don’t take it so personally.”

Jack starts laughing. It comes out of him like surprise. “Oh, great, the one thing in the entire universe that can make you stop arguing with everything that I do and it's a bomb. Why didn't I think of that years ago.”

“Go to hell, Zimmermann,” Kent says, but his voice is lighter.

“Pretty sure we’re already here.”

The anger sits in his stomach, and it waits. Jack is good at waiting. Everything they’ve done since they day they met has been a competition. It didn’t even stop when Kent died - it just became less obvious to everyone else but him. So this is just one more game, with a new set of rules, and Jack is not going to lose this.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The final recording feels like looking up a mountain. They both stare at it, blinking on the old monitor screen.

“Don’t you think this is kinda morbid?” Shitty winces. “You really think we outta listen to - “

“How he died?” Jack finishes. Jack doesn’t tell him that it’s too late, that he already has, over and over and over again. That there were years where he thought of nothing else, every possible iteration of it. Jack doesn’t tell him that he used to look up at the sky and imagine his body up there, alone, freezer-burned or just space dust. Jack doesn’t tell him that he has to know.

Shitty gets it anyway. He’s intuitive in a way Jack’s never been. He sees it, Jack thinks, in his hands.

“I’ll uh,” Shitty starts to move away, kicks off the floor, “I’ll go man, get that door open and see if there’s anything I can do to help Lardo - give you some privacy - “

Jack grabs his wrist so Shitty bobs awkward, spins a little sideways. He didn’t mean to make it so forceful. “Would you stay?” he says.

Shitty looks at him.

“Yeah, boss,” he says. “Sure will.”

 

 

 

 

 

_Captain’s log. U.S.S. Hephaestus Station. Final entry._

_I only have three words to say to you. I’ve boiled it down. Took some time. I’m not a man of few words, and I’m angry, and there are a lot of ways I can say this. Hope you’re ready._

_Run and hide._

_See, I’m better with action than I am with saying the right thing. But I’m gonna do the right thing, when I get out of this. I will get out of this. You fuckers thought you could just leave us out here, to rot. Surprise! It’s me! Your worst nightmare. Knock-knock! Who’s there?_

_Shoulda sent me farther. Nice try._

_So if you’re listening to this - yeah. Run and hide._

_The rest of this message isn’t for you. It’s for someone else. I know - fuck. I know you’re not gonna get this, so it doesn’t matter. You probably haven’t gotten a single damn thing I recorded, all those apologies. Everything I shoulda said. Not like you ever called me back when I was within cell phone service, but I guess I can’t blame you for living your life without me in it. I did, for a while. But everything we fought about, everything we said. It doesn’t really matter anymore._

_You’re not gonna get this anyway._

_But this is just in case I don’t -_

_I never said it. I thought it, sometimes I wanted to. But I never did and I just have to before I can’t - damn it, Jack, I love -_

 

 

 

 

 

Jack plays that last recording, over and over again. He’d known, in a way. Maybe he had, intuitively. He had spent so long looking inwards, pushing outwards. He’d needed to meet someone to show him how to push past that, and that person was never going to be Kent Parson.

He’d known. Had he? Maybe. But it’s one thing to guess, and another to hear it.

He plays that last recording, over and over, and he thinks a lot about the past.

He didn’t expect it to come back, quite so literally, to haunt him.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

Shitty’s got an idea. It’s complex and surprisingly devious, and involves faking a crisis and overestimating their opponent. Jack forgets that he supposedly went to law school until moments like this.

“That sounds complicated,” Jack says. The more complicated the plan the more room for error.

“Do you have an easy three-step solution to stopping your homicidal ex-best-friend from blowing us all to kingdom come?”

“Yes,” Jack says, and he proffers the canister of halothane gas.

“Uh,” Lardo says. Jack imagines, rather than sees, her sidelong glance to Shitty, which annoys him.

“Commander,” Shitty says slowly. “You wanna - knockout gas your homicidal ex-best-friend?”

“Yes,” Jack says firmly. “I very much want to give him a little 20-hour nap, disarm that thing on his arm, get rid of that bomb before he can do something about it.”

“Uh,” Lardo says again, “Commander.”

“What?” Jack snaps. “Your plan isn’t bad but it’s complicated. We don’t have room for complicated.”

“I guess we just thought that,” Lardo pauses for a moment, “that you - “

“ - that you stopped being friends with him because he - uh - fucking died?”

“And that you’d want to take a slightly diplomatic approach to this,” Lardo finishes. They’ve obviously talked about this. The implication that they talk about him is also annoying.

“It was complicated,” Jack says. “Just like this is complicated.”

“That could mean about thirty-three-thousand different things,” Shitty says, “no offense. And I’m not real keen on breaking the Geneva Conventions today. A little offense.”

“We had a falling out,” Jack says. “And he didn’t get over it.”

“Uh,” Shitty winces, “tell me something I don’t know, man.”

“You’ve got a crush on a robot.”

“Technically she’s an A.I.”

“I’m right here,” Lardo says.

“And you’ve got a crush on - “

“That’s none of your business,” Lardo says primly.

“And this thing with Parson is none of yours.”

“Except it is,” Lardo interjects, “because he wants to blow me up. And we can’t afford to make this about your grudge match, Commander.”

She’s right, of course.

“Okay, fine,” Jack says. He taps the can of knockout gas again. “But this is plan B.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Having a secret somehow puts them back on the same footing, in Jack’s head. It feels like things should feel between them. And even if Kent doesn’t know what it is, Kent knows something. He doesn’t let Jack get far out of his sight as they continue repairs on the shuttle.

Jack isn’t a mechanic but he doesn’t have a bad eye for these things and he’s learned a thing or two in the time he’s been up here. He’s getting pretty handy with a drill and electric wiring. His dad would be impressed by that, probably.

He feels Kent’s eyes on his back from across the room, which shouldn’t be satisfying but is.

“So, Zimmermann,” Kent says, when Jack lowers the drill to wipe his forehead and push his hair out of his eyes. “You heard all about what I’ve been up to. Took a trip, never reached my destination. Real weird. How have the last few years been for you, then?”

Jack doesn’t look at it. He has to, he thinks, say it sometime.

“Fine,” he says. “I got married.”

There’s a long silence. Jack can’t help it; he breaks. He turns to look. Kent is smiling and his teeth are like a barricade.

“Mazel tov!” He says it through the grin. “Guess my invitation got lost in the mail. It’s fine. Seven and a half light years is a hell of a lot of postage.”

“You were gone,” Jack says sharply. He wants Kent to stop smiling. To hit him. That, at least, would be expected. He turns back to the panel on the wall, twists some wires. They aren’t the right wires to twist but he can’t lose this battle of stoicism and he knows how impassable his own shoulders look because he got them from his father.

He doesn’t have to wait very long. That’s expected.

“So how long did you wait,” Kent says jauntily, “after my body was in the ground. A week? Maybe a month, for posterity?”

“Your body isn’t in the ground,” Jack says cooly. “It’s right here, being a dick to me. We were living together then, actually. He came to your funeral. But the wedding was after that.”

"He? That's a surprise.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Did you really take him to my funeral? I didn’t invite him.”

"You thought I'd go alone?" 

"You coulda brought your dad!"

"He came too, Kent, Jesus Christ. I didn't want to go by myself."

"Oh grow up," Kent says. "What, did you think dead me would be happy for you? Think again. Dead me didn't give a shit." 

"I wasn't thinking about that at the moment," Jack snaps. "Asshole." 

"It was my funeral!" Kent exclaims. "It was literally all about me!" 

"I said something nice about you," Jack says, "so I'm not going to apologize for bringing moral support." 

"You did? What'd you say?"

"None of your business," Jack says primly. 

"It literally is." 

"No, it's not." 

Kent raps his knuckles against metal paneling. The sound is sharp and metallic. “So you’re saying you waited to tie the knot ‘til after the service. Made real sure I wasn’t gonna come back and mess up your perfect life?” That sounds like gloating.

“Not to belay the point,” Jack says, less coolly, “but here we are.”

“Yeah. Here we are.”

He sounds smug, and that does it, and suddenly Jack can’t hold it in a second longer. He turns to face him, grabs one of the rungs of the ladder to stop himself spinning. Jabs his finger into Kent’s chest.

“Do you recall the last conversation we had?” He snaps, and Kent’s eyes narrow because he does. Jack knows he does. “Where we both said that we never wanted to see each other again? I took that meaning pretty literally, Kent. Sorry if I misunderstood you.”

“I called you a week before I left,” Kent says, his voice suddenly low. Serious. “You never called me back.”

“I didn’t have anything to say to you.”

“Sounds like a lot of excuses, Zimmermann,” Kent says, and he doesn’t smile this time. His mouth is tight. “You always had lots of ‘em.”

“You are being a real pain in the ass since coming back from the dead,” Jack says. “So can you blame me?”

“Yes,” Kent says. He turns suddenly, moves back to the wall and picks up the wrench again. “Yes, I can.”

Jack picks up the drill and turns back to his own project. He’s about to start it up again when Kent speaks.

“Your dad cry? Bet that was sweet.”

“Why are you even asking that?”

“Just usually something you let someone know,” he says, “before macking all over them. The big M.”

“You were dead,” Jack says, and he doesn’t know why he doesn’t feel ashamed of it. “Anyway, you were yelling at me.”

“Well, you were yelling back!”

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Kent snorts, unexpectedly. Jack glances over at him, the back of his bowed head. His unfamiliar haircut. The curve of his ear.

“What if I’d come back?” Kent says to the wall. His voice wavers. He never had any idea how to keep his head. Jack thinks, worryingly, of his pulse. “If I hadn’t been dead.”

“I don’t know.” Jack says. That isn’t a lie. It should be, but it’s not.

“Well,” Kent turns, and there’s an attempt at bravado. It’s not a good one. Jack can see through it. “I’m here now.”

“That’s the problem,” Jack says, and he turns back to the wall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack found out because Kent’s sister called him.

They’d kept in touch some, after Kent left, partially because Jack knew how angry Kent would be about it and partially because he likes Sam, loves her like he imagines you’d love a little sister. She’s bright and acerbic in the same way Kent was, but she knows where her edges are in a way Kent never cared to learn.

She called at 6 a.m. on a Tuesday. Jack was up to go on a run, pulling on socks and drinking water in the kitchen. He didn’t recognize her voice.

“Jack,” she said.

“You know it’s six in the morning,” he snapped.

“Jack it’s me,” she said. “Someone from the air force is here. It’s Kent. He - “

He didn’t recognize her voice because it was clogged with tears.

“What, Sam,” Jack said, very slowly. He didn’t feel fear, or worry. He didn’t feel anything.

“He’s dead,” Sam said, her words clear but distorted like they were coming through a long-range radio from a very far distance. “There was an explosion. An accident. On the station, up there. He’s dead.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Jack says, robotic. Later, he would go on to call her back to talk to her properly. Later, he would go on to book a red-eye flight from Providence to upstate New York. But then, he hung up the phone and stood there for a long time in the dark.

Bitty found him, still wearing his socks and no shoes, still holding the phone, in the kitchen an hour later. He didn’t have to ask to know that something was wrong. He took the phone out of Jack’s hand and set it on the counter and put his hand on Jack’s chin.

“Honey,” he said, “what is it?”

Jack had told him about Kent, a few times in passing when his face and his Iraq War record ended up on the news, and once in detail. It had unfurled out of him, a long weekend away and a bottle of wine down and the warmth of another man’s shoulder against his shoulder. It wasn’t a fun story to tell. It had made Bitty angry, defensive, righteous on his behalf; such uncomplicated emotions for something that was never simple, not even once.

His mouth felt numb. “It’s Parse,” he said, and nothing else. Jack didn’t know how to say that he’d felt the entire universe collapse, condense, get a little smaller with the removal of one component that had been so instrumental to the fabric of the way things always were. You versus me. Here versus there. Even if they never saw each other again, never spoke again, Jack would have known - that he was out there somewhere, somewhere.

This wasn’t supposed to end this way.

Bitty’s mouth got very small and his eyes very dark. “Come back to bed,” he said, and took Jack’s hand, so maybe he understood what lay beyond words in Jack’s eyes.

Sometimes when people die they leave holes in the world, things that can never be filled up again.

 

 

 

 

 

Once upon a time there were two friends who had a lot of potential, both individually and together. One of them couldn't handle the pressure, and the other went on to do something brave and never came back. 

Til he did.

Now that’s a plot twist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack finishes his shift and eats something nutritional but bland and stands in the shower until the hot water turns icy - seven minutes, maybe a record - and he returns to his quarters. They’re empty and he’s not sure why he expected anything different, and he’s not in the mood for another fight - but everything feels too quiet. The ship creaks and shifts as pressure and temperature change. He hears Shitty’s voice, then Lardo’s, as Shitty leaves his own bunk - and then it fades down the hall. 

Jack wonders if they’re doing the right thing. If there’s another choice he’s just not seeing. If there is any way out of this. 

Without thinking too much about it, he finds himself flipping through the book of things he brought with him. Photos and a few recorded videos saved in flash drives and newspaper clippings neatly organized in plastic sheets. Jack turns past them until he finds what he’s looking for, slipped behind an old photo of his parents. 

A three-image photobooth strip. Sun faded. They’d been twenty-one, maybe. Kent pulls a face at the camera, throws back his head in laughter, kisses Jack’s jaw - bright and with abandon. In the photograph, Jack is watching him and his face is hard to read. 

Or maybe that’s just what Jack remembers. It’s hard to tell. 

He’s not sure how much time has gone by when he hears the knock at the metal door to his bunk. Shitty, probably, for details of their collusion. Jack ignores it but then it happens again - rhythmic, knuckles on metal. 

It’s Kent, suspended sideways with one hand clutching the frame of the doorway and the other raises to rap his hand against the door a third time. He opens his mouth to say something then stops, and Jack realizes he hadn’t dropped the photograph when he’d moved to open the door.

“Jesus Christ,” Kent says. They both stare, taken aback, at their own faces clutched in Jack’s hand. Kent’s face collapses from something composed to something chaotic. “Jesus - “ he says again. “You - you’re ragging on me for not remembering how things went down and you’re carrying that around with you?” 

Jack drops the picture. It floats, stubbornly, up in front of his face. Kent snatches it before it goes too far. 

“Maybe don’t let that fly into a vent,” he says, but it doesn’t sound sharp like it should. He presses it to Jack’s chest, half a shove, and Jack takes it back. “Where the hell’d you get it, anyway?” 

“It was in your stuff,” Jack says, and he turns to put the picture back where it came from, sliding it behind the family photograph and clipping the book shut. “I found when your mother and I cleaned some things out.” 

“Nosy,” Kent says. It should be sharp but it isn’t. It sounds as chaotic as his face looks. Unsettled. He’d followed Jack into the room and when Jack turns they’re very close together. Kent’s fist clenches, then relaxes.

“Why’d you come down here?” Jack asks, his heart suddenly faster than it ought to. He can feel sweat prickle the back of his neck, hot and then cold in a rush. His own words sound hollow and strange, like he’s saying something bigger than what he’s asking. “Is there something wrong with the shuttle?” 

“Shuttle’s fine,” Kent says. He doesn’t blink. 

“Then what do you want, Parse?” Jack asks. It’s a question in a question and he imagines, rather than feels, the tremor in the palms of his hands. He doesn’t know what answer he’s looking for but what he gets is not what he expects at all.

“To mess up your perfect life,” Kent says suddenly, harsh and whisper-soft, and he doesn’t move for a long second that feels like an eternity. Jack thinks he can hear his pulse - or maybe it’s just his own - and they stare at each other for the length of a second, an eternity, and neither one looks anywhere else. 

It’s a chance, Jack realizes, for Jack to turn away because Kent is always waiting for Jack to turn away -  because Jack had, once, set the pattern for the rest of their lives and he sees that as clearly as he knows that he is going to break it. 

In a different time he might have wondered, obsessed over, which of them moved first. But now he doesn’t notice. 

Now all he knows is that they meet in the middle. 

They collide is a disorderly, frantic tangle. Kent’s hands catch the collar of Jack’s uniform and Jack has to grab his waist, hard, to stop him spinning sideways and away, and their mouths slide over and past each other before they come together, breathless and dizzy and desperate, turned upside-down in a space where directions have no meaning. They used to practice at this, but it’s been a long time and the rules are different but Jack doesn’t care. All Jack cares about is proximity, how to get as close to Kent as he can and to feel, frantic and alive, his heartbeat and the warmth of the blood moving under his skin and his pulse, soaring and irregular, against Jack’s jaw, his hands, his mouth. 

Kent kisses him. Jack kisses back. 

It’s fierce enough that it hurts and neither of them care, Kent’s teeth against Jack’s neck and his hands that seem to be everywhere at once until Jack catches his arm to put his mouth to the soft part of his wrist, the trace of blue veins and his wild pulse. 

Kent’s legs are caught around Jack’s knees, then his waist, the hard line of his thigh impossibly real, and he yanks his arm back to pull at Jack’s uniform zipper when their trajectory takes them into the wall. 

They ricochet, Kent’s legs still around Jack’s waist, and Jack attempts to grab at the straps on his bed to stop them but all he does is swing them in a wild arc so Kent’s head runs into the metal rim on the window of glass that gives a view into the darkness of space beyond. 

“Ow!” Kent yelps, “motherfucker - “ and he lets go, limbs and the sleeves of his uniform flailing. Jack grabs at his knee, then his arm, so they’re an odd weightless extension of arm-leg-arm, and Kent meets his eye, face flushed, and starts laughing. 

“What?” Jack says, watching as Kent scrubs his hands over his face and snorts into them. “This was - “

“Not protocol,” Kent wheezes. “You think Pryce and Carter have some tips for boning in zero g?”  

“I think that’s in the second edition,” Jack says dryly, and Kent cackles, bobbing helplessly. “With diagrams.” 

Jack feels laughter well up in his own throat and swallows it down because it feels insane, too intimate even on the edge of what they’re about to do. He pulls at Kent’s knee, then his arm, hauling him in. Kent lets him, laughing, and catches Jack’s shoulder with one hand. Jack braces himself against the edge of the bolted-in bed and watches his laughter subside. 

“I just - “ Kent rubs his head, his hand around Jack’s forearm. “Guess I thought if that was gonna happen I’d pull it off with a little more finesse. Or gravitas.” 

“Oh, God,” Jack says, and he starts laughing too. 

“What? Is that a pun? How do you have gravitas with no gravity?” 

“You didn’t show up again all that different,” Jack says, and he puts his hand to the side of Kent’s face, along his jaw. “You’re not gonna start acting with finesse now.” 

“Don’t sound too disappointed,” Kent says quietly. Jack can see him swallow, can count the lashes on his lids. Can feel his breathing. 

“If I was,” he says, “I wouldn’t be doing this.” 

Jack leans in, slow, and he wants this to matter, to mean something and - 

_ Beep, beep beep, beep _ _. _

“Uh,” Jack says, and they both  look  towards the strap on Kent’s wrist. “Can you - uh, do this?” 

“Shut up,” Kent pulls a face. “Yeah, yeah, just give me a second okay?” 

“Seriously,” Jack sighs, and straightens as much as anyone can straighten given the lack of gravity. “Parse. Can you? Because I do not want to blow up my crew over this - “ 

“Is that a dead man’s switch on my arm,” Kent grins suddenly, wolfishly, “or am I just happy to see you?” 

“That is not funny.” 

“Kinda is.” 

He’s not wrong, which makes Jack madder, and mostly makes him want to laugh. 

“Zimms,” Kent says slowly, and he lets go of Jack’s arm to put one hand at his pulse, just for a second, then returns it. “Just trust me.” 

Jack should argue, but he doesn’t. He just shakes his head, lets his laughter come out through his teeth, and the beeping slows to nothing. 

“Okay,” Kent says, firmly. “Blow me away, Commander.” 

“That,” Jack looks at him, and smiles, “is still not funny.”

“Kinda is.” 

It is, of course. 

Seven and a half light years from earth, and some things feel the same as they used to. That’s what Jack thinks when he listens to Kent’s sharp intake of breath moments before they kiss. At the moment, that isn’t a bad thing. 

 

 

 

 

 

“Kinky,” Kent says, when Jack adjusts the strap that’s designed to prevent the sleeper from becoming airborne in the middle of the night around both of their waists. 

Jack doesn’t dignify that with a response. He looks out the window instead; the station is tilted so he can see the edges of the star, bright against the dark beyond. 

“Fucker,” Kent says. He seems to be talking to the star. Jack doesn’t disagree. 

Kent’s elbow digs into his side; they don’t fit, not really, in the space they’re occupying and Jack doesn’t know where to look, Kent’s bare shoulder or the edges of the star or something far off and distant beyond the light the star gives off. They’re all just as complicated, right now.

“Can I ask you something?” Kent says, after a long silence. Jack turns his head to look at him; Kent is staring up and away, towards the doorway of Jack’s quarters

“Yes,” Jack says. 

“Did you, uh,” Kent pauses, shifts as much as he can given their position. Jack moves some more to give him room but Kent doesn’t take him up on it, just stares straight ahead. “Did you think about me?” 

Kent’s logs are saved in the computer in Jack’s room, the ones they recovered. Addressed to him, even if he never said that in words.

“Yes,” Jack says, and he does look at him. He focuses on the line of Kent’s nose, the shell of his ear. He used to have freckles there. “Sometimes. Sometimes often.” 

“I mean,” Kent’s eyes slide over towards Jack’s and then away again. It’s so strange what passes for honesty; they’re skin-to-skin but he won’t make eye contact. “Shitty stuff, right?” 

“Not always,” Jack says, which is the truth. 

“I’m sure that got easier, after - “

“Not always.” 

“As long as you made me sound, you know, debonair and handsome in death.” Kent’s mouth quirks, a little. 

“Not always,” Jack says, and he smiles when Kent elbows him and he doesn’t move when Kent’s hand stays on his chest. 

“Sometimes is good enough.” 

“Kenny.” Jack puts his hand over Kent’s hand and Kent’s mouth gets tight and Jack can see the truth in it, somehow. 

“I thought I’d never see you again.” Kent’s hand flexes on Jack’s chest, like a reflex, and his voice is all over the map, weird and raw. “Thought all that shit I said to you was gonna be the last thing.” 

“I thought you were dead,” Jack says, and his own voice is barely recognizable. “That isn’t - it’s not an excuse. I know you think it is but it isn’t.” 

“I thought I was dead,” Kent says, and he smiles a little. “I mean, soon to be.” 

“Yeah.” 

They look at each other. Outside the station, the star flares then settles. The metal creaks and groans as the station moves through space. He closes his eyes. When Jack concentrates he can feel their trajectory. 

“Jack,” Kent says, and Jack opens his eyes. “Can you do something for me?” 

“Yeah,” Jack says. He waits. Kent’s eyes are very pale, his pupils very small. “What it is?” 

“Can you just - “ Kent swallows and his hand flexes again, then grips at Jack’s bicep. “Just say that it’s gonna be okay. I know it’s not. I just - just say it?” 

Jack thinks about the dead man’s switch on Kent’s wrist, and the bomb. He thinks about watching the battered shuttle pull into the Hephaestus station, and about the star flaring outside the window, and about his crew. He thinks about the canister of halothane knockout gas stored in the bridge, and about a grave in New York with no body in it, and about home. 

Kent is watching him, wary, and Jack doesn’t want to lie. He can’t see how anything good will come of this. 

He takes a deep breath. 

“Kent,” he says, and he reaches out across the space between them and touches Kent’s hair, pushes it behind his ear. Kent doesn’t close his eyes and he doesn’t look away even as Jack leans in and puts his mouth to Kent’s forehead, just for a second. 

“Yeah?” 

“Everything is gonna be okay.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> if i were to tag this fic how it should be tagged nobody would read it but. warnings for: major character death (that doesn't stick), infidelity (sorry), alien fucking (less sorry.)
> 
> don't think about where the story goes from here. i can't recommend it. don't think about shitty knight stuck aboard the u.s.s. horrible unending nightmare. don't think about "desperate measures." don't think about it. why do i love this podcast so much?  
> (jack "hello, you disgusting piece of human garbage" zimmermann. kent "i've got an astrophyisicist to put the fear of ME into" parson. shitty "get your lyre, nero. rome is buring." knight. lardo "top of her class" duan.) 
> 
> i hate kepler so i'd never actually write any further into the story but uh. don't think about it. 
> 
> xo


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